REVIEW: Author seeks truth of wreck

* This West Sound native's true tale of a mysterious fishing vessel disaster hits close to home.

It's probably safe to say that every household in Kitsap County knows someone who has made a living or earned money for education by traveling to Alaska to fish or crab or work in the fish or crab processing plants at sea and on shore.

Those who have fished in Alaskan waters, where storms can cause freak waves and temperatures can make working conditions unbearable, don't need to read about the dangers described in Patrick Dillon's new book on the loss of two crab boats from the Anacortes fleet on Valentine's Day 1983.

But Dillon's book puts the rest of us in a place we'd probably never choose to be - from the comfort of our own armchairs we get a sense of what commercial fishing life is like and how the pressures on the captains and crews combine with the elements to make commercial crabbing in Alaskan waters the single most dangerous job to be had in the United States.

"Lost at Sea: An American Tragedy" describes what happened to the Americus and the Altair, two modern fishing vessels built in Anacortes from state-of-the-art plans, on their final crabbing venture into the seas north of the Aleutian Islands - describes what happened, at least, until the Altair was seen by a passing fishing boat as it headed out of Dutch Harbor about 8 a.m. Feb. 14, 1983.

What happened thereafter is a matter of conjecture. Not one member of the two crews - seven men per boat - lived to talk about it. The capsized Americus was spotted that day by a passing freighter, but before any rescue effort could be organized, it sank. The Altair simply disappeared, leaving as its only trace a life raft that was spotted a month later.

Dillon, a veteran journalist who worked for the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, grew up on Bainbridge Island and was drawn back to Puget Sound in 1994 when he began researching "Lost at Sea."

The loss of the Americus and the Altair was America's worst fishing disaster. Dillon says he drew inspiration to write the story from Norman McLean's "Young Men and Fire," which tried to solve the mystery of how a group of smokejumpers died in a Montana forest fire.

Dillon faced a similarly daunting mystery. How could two fishing vessels - two of the best-designed, best-maintained, best-equipped vessels to ply Alaskan waters - capsize and sink in relatively calm waters just after leaving port, without transmitting any message of warning or danger?

Daunting mysteries tend to make very good reading.

Dillon tells this very real story as well as most novelists could. He develops the characters and gets the reader interested in their lives and empathetic of their plight.

He tells the story of the two vessels and their two crews first, then shifts the focus of the book to follow the Coast Guard investigators as they attempt to explain what happened.

Finally, Dillon's focus shifts to the efforts of Peggy Barry, whose son died while working aboard an Alaskan fishing boat, to persuade Congress to pass legislation requiring Coast Guard inspections of fishing vessels for seaworthiness.

Dillon spent many hours interviewing people who knew the crew members of the two boats. He lived for a while in Anacortes. He examined the transcripts and the documents gathered by the Coast Guard investigation. And then he signed on to spend a season crabbing in Alaska on a boat skippered by the son-in-law of one of the captains who died.

As a result, "Lost at Sea" brings you as close as you'll ever want to go to that experience.

"Lost at sea: an american tragedy" by Patrick Dillon

264 pages

Dial Press, $23.95

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